I don’t miss the Christmas phone shift, though

Friday, 5 December 2003

At work on my desk I had most of the things that mattered to me. I had
about 250 CDs, mostly good ones that are still selling, so that was
about $2,000-$4,000 there. I had a CD player, obviously. Various toys,
models. A sweet reproduction of a deinonychus skull. A beautiful blue
4" high carcharodon megalodon tooth. My prized full keichousaur
fossil where you can see his last meal in his little ribs and
everything. A handful of trilobites, spinosaur teeth and such like and
so on. My whole collection. My personal laptop. A couple hundred bucks
in technical books. Any number of other irreplaceable small personal
artifacts from the reliquary. All right there on my desk. In a
building with 300 employees, open 24 hours a day with little or no
security. The lights rarely on because the place was lighted by desk
lamps and creatively strung Christmas lights and Chinese lanterns.

I never had so much as a coprolite stolen. In fact, when my Kyuss CDs
disappeared, I sent a note out asking for them back. Now I have two
sets of them b/c someone returned mine and someone else gave me theirs
because they thought mine might have been stolen.

In 1998. That was at Amazon.com in 1998. That’s what Amazon.com was
like then. Most every desk in the place was like mine. Every damn
employee in the house at that time had full SQL access to everything
in the store. A new customer service representative could steal or
even erase the entire Amazon.com store of knowledge (till the tapes
were retrieved anyway) in just a few keystrokes if one wanted and
knew how. There were never any breaches of trust then. Lord, I do miss
it.

Right before I left, a few months ago already, there were several
laptops stolen. Various other things. It was pretty bad. Everyone was
locking their offices and even their desks. A long list of managers
were each caught making up to $5,000 a month in personal calls on
their corporate cell-phones while kids in the trenches of actually
doing things for customers now need Director level approval to get
a $150 software license for something crucial to doing daily work.

I read recently that 83% of the employed are not that happy with their
situation and would change it if they could. Where Amazon.com is
concerned, that seems a pretty kind estimate. The abhorrent job market
in Seattle is all that keeps most of the shop in their chairs.

I still have about 20 friends there, though at one point I knew at
least 400 people and counted many of them friends. One of the 20 still
at the ’Zon recently said it this way:

My job seems more
and more like the “Shawshank Redemption”–a daily ass rape marathon
that will eventually end in a big payoff.

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Sedition·com is green

One day a shepherd discovered a fat Pig in the meadow where his
Sheep were pastured. He very quickly captured the porker, which
squealed at the top of its voice the moment the Shepherd laid his
hands on it. You would have thought, to hear the loud squealing,
that the Pig was being cruelly hurt. But in spite of its squeals
and struggles to escape, the Shepherd tucked his prize under his
arm and started off to the butcher’s in the market place.

The Sheep in the pasture were much astonished and amused at the
Pig’s behavior, and followed the Shepherd and his charge to the
pasture gate.

“What makes you squeal like that?” asked one of the Sheep. “The
Shepherd often catches and carries off one of us. But we should
feel very much ashamed to make such a terrible fuss about it like
you do.”

“That is all very well,” replied the Pig, with a squeal and a
frantic kick. “When he catches you he is only after your wool.
But he wants my bacon! gree-ee-ee!”